As the year draws to a close, it is time to review my hopes for the year. I wrote them in week #140, at the beginning of 2025.
I started dusting them off a few weeks ago in preparation for our seasonal discipline get-together.
- I hope we can publish the reworked German Service Standard and get some good and sustainable attention for it across the public sector.
Status: 🟢 Achieved. The updated Service Standard was published and gained significant traction across government and specialist media. - I hope we make a proper good Service Manual for people working on public services in Germany and work on it across organisations collaboratively.
Status: 🟢 Achieved. The new Service Standard page includes a dedicated, growing handbook section that is tightly integrated into the overall offering. It includes 4 pieces of guidance and 2 practice reports currently. - I hope we can get our updated service quality criteria linked to procurement rules and frameworks—in at least some places—to steer newly commissioned work in the right direction.
Status: 🟠 Partially achieved. The States of Brandenburg and Hamburg have picked this up, but it’s still in the making. We also started talking to colleagues investigating spend controls and interested in linking them to the Service Standard. - I hope we can expand Service Standard peer reviews to the non-Federal level and suppliers, ideally without ourselves even being involved.
Status: 🟠 Partially achieved. We cannot make ourselves obsolete yet. Not for various years. But we started running Service Standard workshops with service teams from various states, and they are interested in running peer reviews next. We have started discussing dates. - I hope we can actively collaborate on Service Standard version 2 implementation with various existing communities of practice to make things stick.
Status: 🟢 Achieved. Good progress here as we brought in the entire DIN consortium to review the core guidance pages. Later in the year, we co-authored practice reports and more detailed guidance with people from various levels of government. - I hope we can establish a cross-public sector blog so more public servants in Germany can join us on the work-in-the-open path.
Status: 🟢 Achieved. Allowing no fragmentation, we have been weaving an ‘in practice’ category into the handbook section of the Service Standard website. Two posts have been published; more are in the making. - I hope that after the general elections in February, there will be a new empowered entity in the Federal government to steer digital public sector transformation.
Status: 🟢 Achieved. None of my doing, absolutely zero, but the creation of the new Federal Ministry for Digital and Government Modernisation fulfilled that hope, and we are linked to the ministry. - I hope that with the new government, Digital Service will get a broadened and deepened remit to do even more transformational work.
Status: 🟠 Partially achieved. We began working on key priorities for the Minister for Digital and his ministry. We have the opportunity to take on some of the most interesting parts of the Federal Modernisation Agenda. At the same time, the actual remit of our organisation has not yet changed in principle. - I hope we can change some of the current project and programme funding logic to enable more long-term work.
Status: 🔴 Not achieved. Nothing has changed so far. But we will not give up there. - I hope we can see and support a previously unseen push for accessibility linked to the Accessibility Reinforcement Act—which we can use as momentum to propel novel activities.
Status: 🟠 Partially achieved. There was some momentum, as I witnessed in various accessibility events I participated in throughout the year. Also, accessibility reports of government offerings were forced open. At Digital Service, we published articles, gave various talks, and made our Chrome extension openly available. - I hope we get more opportunities for true service design work: end-to-end, back-to-front, and across channels, so we can offer reference points to inspire others.
Status: 🟠 Partially achieved. We have been taking steps, but we aren’t where I hoped we would be. We are now working on ‘starting a business’, which is our best shot yet. We also blogged about the work done so far in mid-December. - I hope we publish the first version of a content design playbook to set a bar for content quality through openly available guidance that others can follow, refer to and build on.
Status: 🟠 Partially achieved. We published guidance on writing for services in plain language in the handbook section of the updated Service Standard. We also have thorough content guidance developed for justice services. It has not been publicly released yet. We also blogged about the role of content design in the justice space in early December. - I hope we can make our approach to discipline governance and leadership visible—so that other public sector organisations can inform their organisational development.
Status: 🟠 Partially achieved. We have not published a blog post yet. But Sonja and I provided an overview in our cross-government user research exchange group, and participants had many questions. We plan to complete the blog post in Q1/2026. - I hope we at Digital Service get to contribute to a sound, shared design system for Germany’s public sector.
Status: 🟢 Achieved. With the new home of the Service Standard, we created a reference implementation for the design system. We are working on page templates and other patterns for the cross-government KERN Design System. We blogged about our commitment and contributions in November. - I hope we can establish stronger ties with other government and public sector units and genuinely collaborate on things.
Status: 🟢 Achieved. We have been actively working with our colleagues in the State of Brandenburg. Also, we have been using the cross-government community to source new guidance and have begun developing a shared publication on research findings and recommendations for shared components. - I hope we can make our disciplines more robust, procedurally and culturally—with a healthy culture allowing people to work sustainably.
Status: 🟢 Achieved. We have scaled formats, onboarded more people leads, established the user-centred design discipline leadership team with Charlotte and Sonja firmly, and increased discipline engagement scores – while growing the discipline by 17%. No one left us. - I hope we get even more opportunities to engage and collaborate with members of the public—to inform our work through co-creation and to rebuild trust in the government.
Status: 🟠 Partially achieved. Some members of the discipline think that we achieved this. We again engaged hundreds of users in our work and collaborated with nonprofit organisations to improve accessibility. In my head, I was still hoping for a bit more co-creation at scale, I guess. - I hope we can establish and then improve a version of an accessibility empathy lab.
Status: 🟢 Achieved. Just in time for Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we made that happen for 15 May. We created an initial version of the empathy lab with posters, instructions, and some handy goggles. We have not yet iterated on it much, but we have already welcomed various guests. - I hope we can build on last year’s momentum with our international in-person events and facilitate further global exchange.
Status: 🟢 Achieved. We had a great time at the April conference in Amsterdam, where we recorded nearly all of the German content and made it available on YouTube afterwards. In summer, we hosted a ‘Design for policy‘ workshop together with the EU Policy Lab at our office, and blogged about all of this in December on the UK’s ‘Design in Government‘ blog. - I hope we can help shape the umbrella brand with meaningful examples of good public services that follow the Service Standard.
Status: 🟢 Achieved. Beyond the reference application of the umbrella brand on the Service Standard website, I made a sketch of what a designed service flow with the cross-government brand and design system would look like. I referenced it in a blog post, showed it in a talk and workshops, and even received applause from the audience. We are moving the justice service platform to the design and other new services we are developing, too. - I hope we can make our accessibility work even more visible and enhance our tools, processes and approaches through more exchange with others.
Status: 🟢 Achieved. Beyond the accessibility empathy lab, we ran workshops, gave talks, and joined panel discussions on accessibility. We published an article about our accessibility work for the Service Gazette, spoke at a local meet-up and shared our efforts in an international call. Our Chrome extension ‘Simulating accessibility personas‘ has over 400 users globally and colleagues from other units participated . - I hope we can have meaningful discussions about measuring the outcomes of our work along with public value-creating metrics.
Status: 🟠 Partially achieved. We have had substantial exchange on measuring evidence of public value. My colleagues Joshua and Joshua have spent significant time with it and blogged about our efforts. We published dedicated guidance on measuring outcomes for the Service Standard handbook section. I was still hoping to have some robust case studies published. - I hope we get more opportunities to bring service and policy design together very upstream—through more task force work on more laws in the making and by combining the digital-ready check for policies and the Service Standard for public services.
Status: 🟠 Partially achieved. We did more vital policy design work, and more service designers than ever before work in that space. We opened up more service design roles in late November. What we have done to only a limited extent is connect the upstream policy design work with service delivery work. In the second half of the year, we did some connected work. I hope we can do so much more in 2026. - I hope to have more EU-level exchanges about public policy and cross-border service transformation.
Status: 🟢 Achieved. We hosted the ‘Design for policy’ workshop with the EU Policy Lab at our office in the summer, which attracted almost a dozen countries. In December, I got to share our work linked to life events in an EU-funded working session at the OECD in Paris and had inspiring exchanges with representatives from the European Commission. There, we had deeper exchanges with colleagues from various EU member states. - I hope we reach many more people with our work and leave a good impression of what government can do.
Status: 🟠 Partially achieved. With democracy in crisis and trust in the state at a low, nothing we did made a big splash, but through our tangible service and policy design work, we have been reaching hundreds – or rather thousands – of people: citizens, residents, refugees, civil servants. From these interactions, we see that our work makes a real difference.
That is plenty. More of my hopes are fulfilled than I had anticipated. I am satisfied.
What’s next
Pretty little, as I have another one-and-a-half weeks of holidays ahead of me before returning to work.
I might catch up with former GDS colleagues in London next week, though.